The hearing ran on 13 August in a San Francisco courtroom, The Verge reported first. It was a compliance check, not a new case.

A jury decided unanimously nearly three years ago that Google held an illegal monopoly over Android apps. Donato set the remedy in October 2024.

That remedy made Google carry rival Android app stores inside Google Play, and give those rivals complete access to its full app catalogue, for several years.

Google started doing it on 22 July. This hearing was about how well.

The search demo

Epic’s lawyer Yonatan Even searched Google Play for “store for apps”. No third-party stores appeared, only physical ones.

Donato reacted from the bench. “Wait, why did Walmart come up?” he asked, then added: “That’s not good.”

His ruling on it was blunt. “That is not acceptable, that has to be fixed. I want every possible variation that’s even only 70 percent properly phrased,” he said.

Google’s counsel agreed to make it happen. The order covers the Play search experience for third-party stores, MLex reported.

That 70% standard is unusually specific for an injunction. It gives both sides something testable rather than a principle to argue about.

It also tells you what the court thinks the problem is. Not the ranking of one query, but the handling of every reasonable way a person might phrase it.

The extra tap

The second problem was the install flow. To install a third-party store, users had to press a View button before an Install button appeared.

Ordinary apps do not work that way. Install is the primary button, one tap from the listing.

Donato bristled at the difference, and that will change too. Third-party stores will be treated more like standard apps, with Install replacing View, 9to5Google reported.

He also went after an interstitial. The “are you looking for” banner is “friction… that has no purpose whatsoever”, he said.

Why the search problem was the whole problem

Google itself had set the terms of discovery. It said users would need either a direct link or specific search phrases to find third-party stores.

Put that beside a search for “store for apps” returning Walmart and the mechanism is visible. A store nobody can find is carried but not distributed.

Epic’s case at this hearing was about that gap rather than about the injunction’s wording. Google was complying with the text.

Android Authority reported the court’s characterisation of the extra steps. It called them deliberate anticompetitive friction meant to deter everyday users.

Google’s defence, and where it failed

The company argues these friction points protect users and devices. Installing another store touches system permissions, and the warnings say so.

The court did not reject that reasoning outright. It rejected safety used as a shield for market position, in Android Authority’s account of the ruling.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Nobody told Google to stop warning users, only to stop stacking warnings where they serve no purpose.

Google has a week to make the changes. That puts the deadline on 20 August, and Google has not said whether it will appeal any part of it.

Google is adding friction somewhere else

A second Android change lands weeks later, and it runs the other way. New sideloading rules start on 30 September.

Those rules require developer verification. Installing an app from an unverified developer will involve a 24-hour waiting period.

That is a different mechanism from the one in court. Sideloading means installing outside any store, and this case is about stores carried inside Play.

The two still land on the same users within six weeks. One route gets easier by court order, and the other gets harder by company policy.

Google frames both as user protection. The court has now tested that framing once, on the narrower of the two.

One entrant, and an uneven rollout

Aptoide Games, run from Lisbon, became the first rival store inside the US Play Store on 10 August. Aptoide has been building Android storefronts since 2009, longer than this case has run.

It handles around 25 million monthly users and more than 400,000 apps, and the US is its largest market. The route in is Play Catalog Access, which carries a $5,000 annual review fee and a 1% malware threshold.

Even that arrival has been patchy. The Verge asked readers two days later whether they could see a rival store inside US Play at all.

Years of operating outside Play turned out to be the qualification for getting inside it. The companies with the least to lose from the friction were the ones already living with it.

The Apple case is on a different track

Epic is fighting both platform owners, at different stages. Apple lost a contempt finding over the 27% commission it charged on external payment links.

That one is going higher. The Supreme Court agreed in June to hear Apple’s appeal.

Google took a different path. It and Epic proposed a settlement in March, then jointly withdrew it in July, which is why the 2024 injunction is the thing being enforced now.

Regulators elsewhere are pushing at the same door. The UK competition authority proposed letting developers steer users to cheaper payments, and Apple agreed with Brazil’s CADE to open iOS to rival app stores.

What would settle it

Three things, and the first is next week. Either the View button is gone and the banner is off, or Google is back in front of the same judge.

The second is search quality. The 70% standard is testable by anyone with a phone, which is unusual for a remedy of this kind.

The third is who else comes. One Portuguese company is in, and a remedy written to open a market will be judged on whether the market opens.

The 2024 injunction runs for several years, so there is time. Compliance hearings are how that time gets used.

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